Can Lord Frost save the Conservative Party from itself? He may be the only one who can. At least, the Tory peer is among the few who has given any indication he has any conception of what the problems are. Whether the government is capable of self-correction, is another matter.

Your Diarist wonders whether a nudge from the public could discharge the Conservatives from their lethargy. In a recent poll commissioned by GB News on voter intentions in the next general election, Labor was the choice of 31 percent of respondents, with the Conservatives far behind at 20 percent.

Those numbers are less flattering when Labor’s Sir Keir Starmer is paired against the two challengers to replace Prime Minister Johnson as Conservative leader: Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak.

Against Ms. Truss, Sir Keir leads by 41 percent to 22 percent. Mr. Sunak fares slightly better. The Labor leader beats him by 40 percent to 23 percent.

Adding insult to injury, when asked in the GB News survey to give one word to describe Ms. Truss, respondents replied (in descending order) “untrustworthy,” “useless,” and “idiot.”

Nevertheless, she remains the putative front-runner. A YouGov survey shows Ms. Truss leading Mr. Sunak by 66 percent to 34 percent — a lead of 32 percentage points.

Although the outgoing prime minister, Mr. Johnson, is said to be “terrified” that the underdog candidate may pull off an upset win. It was Mr. Sunak’s resignation in July that set off the avalanche of MP desertions that forced Mr. Johnson to pull the plug on his premiership.

BoJo is still harboring a grudge. Like the Bourbons of old, he has “learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.” As controversy crested in July, YouGov found that more Conservatives wanted him to resign than remain — 54 percent to 33 percent. Considered as a whole, the general consensus was decisively against the Prime Minister: 69 percent to 18 percent.

Now, Boris basks in the latest YouGov finding that, in a three-way race against his two rivals, he almost doubles their approval among the Tory faithful: 46 percent want him to lead the Conservatives, compared to Truss’s 24 percent and Sunak’s 23 percent.

Consider me gobsmacked. What can the Conservatives be thinking? Is their aim simply to confirm John Stuart Mill’s condemnation — that “stupid persons are generally Conservative”? If there is an esoteric political logic at play to justify such polling, it escapes me. Just call me . . . “Conservative.”

Nevertheless, absent Mr. Sunak’s miracle to become Tory leader, Ms. Truss will need a miracle to remain Tory prime minister. Regardless of the five-year duration of Parliament — mandating an election no later than January 2025 — Sir Keir and Labor will use their popularity and Conservative confusion to call for a general election to “legitimize” the new leader’s mandate to govern the United Kingdom.

Ergo Lord Frost. He earned the respect of thoughtful Tories who are skeptical about the Conservative Government’s program of taxation and spending, and policies on Covid, the environment, and energy sufficiency. While Boris Johnson was orchestrating this cacophony of calamities, Lord Frost resigned in frustration in December 2021, while others were content to continue along this route.

He thus enjoys the element of “street cred” when the country, if perhaps not all Conservatives, are calling for meaningful change. According to the London Sun, Ms. Truss wants the peer “to run the Cabinet Office” — the apex of the Whitehall bureaucracy. He himself is coy, with respect to future job prospects in a Truss ministry.

“No-one should be speculating about future roles in government while the leadership election is still not even over,” he responded to the London Sun. “I continue to be fully behind Liz as the best candidate for future PM.”

As for the Truss campaign, it is non-committal. “We don’t comment on rumors, gossip, or speculation — we’re taking nothing for granted,” a spokesman says. Nor should it. Can Lord Frost and a cohort of Brexit stalwarts save the Conservative Party from itself? Can anybody?

BrexitDiarist@gmail.com